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There are two critical factors that have a dramatic impact on the success of change—adequate capacity and the assurance of the right skills and knowledge to fulfill the requirements of the future state. This is especially true if the transformation you are after requires the organization to break through to new levels of performance.

Having surveyed thousands of leaders, managers, and consultants over four decades, adequate capacity to change is the number one issue impairing the success of change. Sponsors need to think through what kind of time, attention, and resources their new solution requires. Many sponsors and project leaders assume the work of making the change a reality can be done on top of people’s current workloads. This is faulty thinking. Change requires the generation of real capacity.

The Sponsor’s Role in Ensuring Adequate Capacity for Change

Capacity is an issue for two groups—the people on the project team who must spend time assessing, planning, and implementing the change, and the stakeholders who must make the change happen on the ground. Both require time, attention, and support to make the change a reality.

Change sponsors need to understand the importance of ensuring adequate capacity for both groups. Too often, after they have handed the change initiative to a project leader and team, they stop thinking about the project until some issue or status report needs their attention. Good sponsors need to do more about planning capacity, given its impact on their initiative.

Once you are clear about the magnitude of capacity required, if it is not already available, it needs to be generated. This is typically not sponsor-level work, but rather falls to the project leader. The exception is when the generation of capacity requires senior leaders to decide what operational work can be slowed down, stopped, or out-sourced to temporarily make room for change work. Then these decisions need to be carried out and monitored for impact on both the operation and the project. Stay on this issue; it can be a make-or-break one for your breakthrough outcomes.

The Sponsor’s Role in Ensuring Stakeholder Capability

Too often, implementation looks like a series of communications and trainings, followed by a hand-off to operations to normalize the new reality. Sponsors may have a role in the communication about deployment. However, after communicating, how do you know if your stakeholders understood and agreed to make the change? This is an important time to stay visible, supportive, and inquiring, especially if the change is burdensome to your stakeholders and the stakes are high. Ask your team to ask your stakeholders—before deployment is planned—what stakeholders think they will need to fully adopt the change. Ensure the team builds their requests, if reasonable, into the deployment training and engagement strategy.

Most change trainings are “tell” oriented—here is the information you need to know and here are the work practices you need to do. We know from experience that one-directional trainings and communications do not land or stick. Just because your stakeholders spend a day in a classroom, even when asked to practice, does not guarantee they built the capability to succeed in the change when back on the job. Set the expectation with your team that stakeholders will be supported after the training to ensure they can be successful. Support the strategy, after they have had a while to try it on for size, to encourage them to openly discuss how it is going, what suggestions they have to make it better, and what more they need to work optimally in the new state. When you provide this permission and support, only then will stakeholders want to make the change a success.

Here’s a tip: Make this support known when you first announce the change.

Dr. Linda Ackerman Anderson is an international speaker, bestselling author, and strategic advisor to the C-Suite and change consultants world-wide. For forty years, Dr. Ackerman Anderson has been guiding visionary leaders of America’s Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and global non-profit organizations to transform themselves and their organizations to Achieve Breakthrough in business results, culture, leadership, and executive team performance.
Linda is the co-founder of Being First, one of America’s most innovative transformational consulting firms, and, with her partner, Dr. Dean Anderson, a co-creator of Conscious Change Leadership, an advanced Body of Work that integrates personal and organizational transformation. Linda received an honorary doctoral degree from Brandman University, part of the Chapman University system, for this pioneering work.
Linda co-authored two cutting edge books that have become classics in the field of organizational transformation: Beyond Change Management: How to Achieve Breakthrough Results through Conscious Change Leadership, and The Change Leader’s Roadmap: How to Navigate Your Organization’s Transformation. She and her co-author, Dr. Dean Anderson, have published over 50 articles on human performance and organizational change, and are the co-developers of The Change Leader’s Roadmap Methodology.